Your audience is hitting your site.

What does your website CTA (call to action) button say today? Is it something like “Learn more” or “contact us?” In some scenarios, these types of CTAs can work. However, in many instances, they leave leads on the table.

Think about a CTA like “Learn more.” What are you actually promising the user? It’s completely unclear. If they really want to learn more about a topic or problem, they can keep reading other pages on your website without converting—or worse, go back to Google and try a different resource (or a different search).

The secret to CTA text is to make it 1) concrete, and 2) unavailable elsewhere. If the user is going to schedule a meeting after filling out the form, then the button should say, “schedule meeting.” If they’re going to watch a demo video, it should say, “watch demo.” These resources shouldn’t be available anywhere else.

Different audiences also respond to different emotional tones. For one company, “schedule meeting” might be the right button text. For another, “book a call” might be better, even though both forms take the user to a calendar. Knowledge of the competition, as well as programmatic experimentation, are key to success here.

How do you know if “schedule a call” or “book a meeting” is the right CTA for your button?

Well, the best way to find out is to experiment.

There are different ways to run A/B tests, based on your organization’s web capabilities. However, the goal is the same, regardless of the medium or the technology. You want to create two variants of a piece of content and split the audience evenly between them. You’re going to change only one variable—that CTA text—so you can attribute any differences in performance to that particular CTA text.

I’ve used Google Optimize for this, as well as time-comparison A/B tests. We can adapt to whatever your organization can support.

Do you know what a good conversion rate is for your industry?

What about a good conversion rate for a particular type of content?

Oh, and how have conversion rates changed over time, as you’ve implemented different CTA buttons?

Data analysis is a crucial component in CRO success. I’ve analyzed every type of CRO data you can imagine—and I’ve developed takeaways, new experiments, and company-specific best practices.

Believe it or not, CTA button design can have a big impact on conversion rates. Maybe your button is extremely rounded and modern-looking, but your audience are older—and used to seeing square buttons.

Maybe you have a skeleton button (i.e. outline only), and it’s getting lost in the overall visual hierarchy.

Whatever the specifics, there are many ways that CTA buttons can fall short. It’s essential to experiment with color, shape, drop shadows, and text length, until you find that magic combination that appeals to your audience.

You can’t throw a Schedule Call button in front of every user, at every point in their journey. When users are just learning about your company, they may not be ready to make a purchase (or talk to a sales rep).

Can you still capture their information and market to them?

Absolutely! The key is to recognize the search intent that brought them to your website. Maybe they’re trying to solve a specific problem on their own, and they search for information, which brings them to your site. If you integrate your content offering and CTA text with this search intent, you can give them a downloadable resource that looks even more valuable than the content that drew them to your site.

When you create a great content offer that’s relevant to their problem, they’ll absolutely give you their information to get your expert content on solving the problem.

This is why targeted content offers are a key part of any CRO program. Think of it as topic-specific downloads that give users exactly what they were looking for. This is one of my favorite elements to add to any combined SEO/CRO program.